How to maximize the value of SlideShare

May 4, 2011

Over the past few weeks, several of our users have written articles sharing tips and best practices for using SlideShare. We think that our extended community will appreciate these insights, and have gathered and published them here. The articles below offer a combined 35+ tips to help you increase views and audience interaction. Key themes include improving the quality of your presentations, content aggregation, increasing interaction by being more social, and the difference between live vs. published presentations.

Jean-Marie Bonthous, aka @seamlessocial, advises on inbound, content and influence marketing, as well as community-building. His "Top 10 Ways to Unleash the Power of SlideShare" offers tactical tips for aligining your account with your search strategy. Also included are specific tips for creating compelling presentations and increasing your click-through rate.

In "How to get the most out of SlideShare" Adam Vincenzini of The Next Web encourages presenters to insert rich media into their presentations. He offers the Dell channel as a model for how a company can customize its account. In addition, he advises "content hunters" to use advanced search, categories and groups in order to make the most of SlideShare as a research tool.

In "10 Ways To Become a SlideShare Marketing Master" Kipp Bodnar of Hubspot points out the difference between live vs. published presentations. Have you thought of creating a revised version of your live presentation? Kipp encourages you to do just that. He references Dan Zarrella's research, summarized in The Science of Presentations. Unlike Jean-Marie Bonthous, Dan's research shows that slideshows with more slides get more views. This underscores the difference between live and published presentations. All the more reason to consider creating a revised presentation, possibly inserting more slides.

Jon Thomas digs a bit deeper into what makes a presentation succeed on SlideShare. In his "5 Tips To Perfect Your Slideshare Presentation"@story_jon shares advice for fine-tuning your presentation. He points out thatns a presentation "fails" when it either suffers from a lack of speaker or from "too many words." Jon gives 5 strong presentation examples (we here at SlideShare know them well) and explains why each works. Jon closes his article with these words of wisdom...

"Slideshare can be a very powerful platform, allowing you to share your information and spread brand awareness. But in the end, it’s always about your audience. Provide them with useful content wrapped in an engaging experience and you’ll have a winner on your hands."

Thank you to authors above who put time and thought into their articles and lists. We really appreciate input from the folks like you who use SlideShare. This helps us understand what works for you, and what we can do to continuously improve.

What tips would you add to these lists? If you found this article helpful, please share it on Facebook and Twitter.